eBooks and Information Products

The vast majority of people go online to get information. One person goes online to get a recipe for Beer Can Chicken, another is in search of a price quote for a gutter cleaning service, and a third hops online to get driving directions to the Grand Canyon.

Information Can Be Sold (or at least Traded)

The person in search of a recipe for Beer Can Chicken might visit a number of websites in search of the perfect recipe. The site that wins is the one that not only gives her the recipe she is looking for, but also collects her contact information in exchange for a downloadable book of 1000 recipes under 300 calories each.

Information Products such as eBooks and Online Courses are the ideal way to do this because they give your website visitors a delicious morsel of information in exchange for something that is very valuable to you - contact information.

Ventures Interactive can help your organization create and market information products like eBooks and online courses. These products can be sold, or they can be given away in return for contact information. This technique is called a "name-squeeze" in some marketing circles, and it is a very effective way to build a database of names and email addresses to sell your products to.

Double-digit Conversion Ratios

Hard conversions (those requiring customers to spend money), have notoriously poor conversion ratios. Unless your domain is Amazon.com, customers may not feel comfortable entering their credit card number into your site. Information products like eBooks and articles (often referred to as "soft conversions") that don't cost money, on the other hand, have a far higher potential conversion ratio.

Whereas a typical hard-conversion ratio might be under 1%, soft conversions can easily convert over 10% of traffic. This allows you to follow up with your customers and establish yourself as a reputable supplier over time; ultimately this can improve conversion rates by a substantial amount because it brings those customers back who otherwise might have wandered off and purchased from a competitor.

eBooks

eBooks are extremely popular for a variety of reasons: they cost nothing to reproduce, they are available instantly, the ubiquity of devices that can read them, and they cost nothing to reproduce (it bears repeating that last one). While paper books are often hundreds of pages long and cost a lot of money and time to write, eBooks are often shorter. For much smaller investment, your business can have eBooks written that can then be converted to operate on Kindle and other eBook readers and distributed for free on your website.

The strategy of leveraging eBooks to improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns is well-established. For many businesses, all the evidence they need is usually found on their competitor's websites where eBooks are often available.

Industry Research

Many industries generate information that can be valuable to potential customers. For example, a software company that makes management software might have collected a large trove of benchmarking data that could be used by prospects to evaluate how they are performing in some particular aspect of their businesses. Managers at these companies would gladly trade their contact information in exchange for access to such valuable information.

Often times business managers do not even contemplate the value of some of the data they have at their fingertips, largely because they don't sell data; they sell tape, or shoes or legal advice. Determining what information your prospects would trade their contact information for is a valuable exercise to go through, especially when contemplating an advertising campaign.

Contacts and Relationships

Another often-overlooked asset many businesses have is their contact list. Allowing prospects to utilize your business as a springboard to improving their network can put you in an unique position to influence large parts of your industry with very little investment. Giving prospects the ability to register on your site in order to get invitations to industry meetings and roundtables can be a very low-cost way to put your company at the center of attention.